News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing by usrusr on Sunday June 02, 2019 @01:21PM (#20076719)
I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons.

edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.

Re:Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing by enitihas on Sunday June 02, 2019 @01:41PM (#20076855)
I think all companies would want to "have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it", since it ensures higher profits and frees you from monopoly accusations, but only few have managed to work it in a good way (e.g, Apple). In most markets where Google succeeded, they ended up being dominant.
Re:Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing by scarface74 on Sunday June 02, 2019 @02:07PM (#20077016)
Apple didn’t do that by reducing cost. They have hundreds of physical retail stores where they hire people directly (not contractors). They did it by offering a product that people were willing to pay a premium for.
Re:Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing by scarface74 on Sunday June 02, 2019 @02:05PM (#20077001)
Does anyone think that GCP is successful by any metric compared to Azure and AWS?
Re:Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing by cameronbrown on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:32PM (#20077510)
The real question is, does Google really need to dominate to be successful? We should be rating success by the quality of a product and market share is a relatively poor proxy for that.
Re:Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing by scarface74 on Sunday June 02, 2019 @04:11PM (#20077784)
The quality of the product especially for enterprise products has a lot to do with the quality of support. Google also lags there.